Jalen Hurts wasn’t the only big winner during the Super Bowl. Wings Etc. Grill & Pub came away smiling as well. And it has a strategy in place to keep it spiking the football throughout the year.
Chuck Moore, COO of Wings Etc.
The brand, which operates 80 locations in 13 states, does big business during the big game, which is no surprise as the National Chicken Council estimated that Americans consumed 1.47 billion wings that day. A lot of pressure? Chuck Moore, chief operating officer for Wings Etc., insists it wasn’t.
“The nice thing is we have technology to absorb orders, where in the old days everything was done by phone,” he said in an interview. “A lot of that stress is taken away so we can focus on managing the orders and pre-orders.”
The pre-orders are key. To hear Moore say it, his Super Bowl Sunday really starts the day before. Call it Somewhat Superb Saturday.
“A lot of people place orders on Saturday night,” he said. “We open our stores on game day at 5 or 6 in the morning to handle everything. This is a trend we’ve seen in recent years that is growing.”
What also is growing is the brand’s off-premises sales. Moore says it is up to one-fourth of all transactions system-wide, with some stores reaching the 40 percent mark. He says this is a big reason for the brand’s confidence that it can reach 100 stores by the end of 2026. That and America’s seemingly unquenchable appetite for wings.
“Everything used to be pizza and burgers and somewhere along the way wings became the alternative,” he said with a laugh. Not that he’s complaining.
But while the 30-year-old brand is experiencing a newfound trendiness, it’s not standing still. It launched its app a year and a half ago and loaded it up with new loyalty rewards, such as a points program and offers for first tastes. It is closing in on 100,000 subscribers. And it has integrated it with its online-ordering platform, which it wields for that most elegant and useful function: listening.
“It’s given us a platform to gather important feedback,” he said. “How are we doing? How can we make the app better? How can we make the experience better? Marrying the app and online ordering platform has been a driving force for us as we reach for our goals.”
And those goals are lofty: to get to 35 percent off-premises sales while maintaining full dining rooms.
Next up may be gamification. “We’ve been asking ourselves how can make our app fun for the generation that loves gaming?” Moore said. “Maybe ours won’t be quite like Fortnite but we want to make it fun.”
That’s in the digital realm. How about the brick-and-mortar stores? The brand is spiffing those up, too. It’s added a drive-up pick-up window. And it’s designed to-go centers at the counters.
“These used to be host centers but today we call them to-go centers because in addition to seeing our guests we use them as our traffic areas for managing to-go and carry-out orders,” he said. “We use our POS platform to manage future orders. We have the technology to throttle the volume that comes in.”
And it’s not done there. It’s also looking hard at kiosks.
“We have been talking with GRUBBRR about a product,” he said. “We look at the big boys out there in the market and how they’re driving some of their guests to that. We know there’s a market of consumers who like to come in, punch in their order, and go.”
Sort of like punching a ticket to the Super Bowl.
